BavÅËiyammaË has been transformed through suffering and rage from a woman into MahÅdevç, but BavÅËiyammaË is also very much a local goddess. In hymns to MÅriyammaË written on palm-leaf manuscripts a century or so ago, PeriyapŬaiyam is hailed as one of the places where she attained fame. Pilgrims still throng to her temple, especially during her annual festival. The village of PeriyapŬaiyam traces its history back to the time when the local landowner discovered BavÅËiyammaË inside an anthill. Many of the priests and devotees in PeriyapŬaiyam told a remarkably consistent story about how BavÅËiyammaË arrived in the village. The story shows how the hill, along with the temple tree and the snakes that dwell in the ant-hill, form a nexus of sacrifice, fertility, and rebirth. The version one of the Naidu priests told us goes like this:
Although the area surrounding the village of PeriyapŬaiyam is now dry and barren, many years ago it was covered by a dense forest. VeÙkala Zamindar lived in the village then. He was a rich man who owned more than fifty cows. Every day a young cowherd took the cows up to a hill near the forest to graze. One day, one of the cows did not give any milk. For three days after that the cow was dry, so VeÙkala Zamindar suspected the cowherd of stealing milk. He beat the boy and shouted at him to confess his crime. But the cowherd insisted he had not stolen the milk, telling the zamindar that every evening the cow wandered off by itself into the forest.
The next evening, VeÙkala Zamindar hid at the edge of the forest and waited. When the cow wandered into the trees, he followed it and watched. Deeper in the forest, next to a river, was an anthill. The cow went up to the anthill and poured milk over it, then wandered back out of the forest to join the other cows. Wanting to know why the cow was pouring milk over the anthill, VeÙkala Zamindar walked up to it and broke it open with his ax. Inside was a stone head, in the shape of
a liÙga; blood was trickling down from the forehead where the ax had struck it. VeÙkala Zamindar ran home in terror.
By the time he reached his house, he was feverish and his body was covered with pox. That night, the goddess ap-peared to him in a dream. “I am BavÅËiyammaË,” she told VeÙkala Zamindar. “I’ve come to reside in this place. If you want to be cured, build me a temple in the auspicious place near the anthill. You must build it in the time it takes to boil a pot of millet. If you do this, you will be cured, and the people of this village will prosper.”
VeÙkala Zamindar called the men of the village and they rushed to the forest and built a temple for BavÅËiyammaË near the anthill. As soon as the temple was completed, VeÙkala Zamindar entered and offered turmeric, flowers, fruit, and a coconut to the goddess. Immediately, he was cured. Ever since then, BavÅËiyammaË has protected the village.11
The concept of a rooted deity inhering in a particular place seems to come from the earliest recorded period of Tamil history (Hart 1975, 21–27). Often the divinity reveals him or herself, as in this myth, in a svayambhâliÙga, a liÙga that appears spontaneously, that “chooses its own place on earth.” Once the divinity is revealed, the sacred place is fixed by the power of the devotees’ devotion. In this myth the goddess emerges from an anthill, out of the earth; the goddess is identified with the soil, the earth, and in this manner is associated with the concept of prati„‡hÅ, the stable foundation on which all life rests (Shulman 1980, 51, 139). In agricultural societies, the soil is the locus of both life and death; the violence that accompanies ploughing and reaping is what allows new life to grow. Tamil can¯kam poems often draw an explicit analogy between the harvesting of grain and the shedding of blood in war (Hart 1975, 31–40). The Tamil goddess is identified with the soil, and therefore with fertility and death.
The anthill as a locus of divinity is a common element in the South Indian folk tradition, as well as a common sight in villages (Elmore 1915, 79, 94; Meyer 1986, 58–59). The anthill also has a long history of symbolic links to the sacrifice, specifically to the “head of the sacrifice.” J. C. Heesterman has elucidated these links in the Vedas and BrÅhmaæas, in which “standard elements and acts of the ritual are referred to as the head of the sacrifice, their installation or perfor-mance signifying the severing and/or restoration of the head. The sacrificial cake is called the head, the potsherds on which it is baked representing the skull bones . . .” (Heesterman 1967, 23). In the ÿg Veda the head contains the essence of the universe. Vedic cosmology
161 Reconstructing the Split Goddess as ÷akti
posits a universe cyclically moving between disintegration and reinte-gration, death and rebirth, which finds ritual expression in the fire altar that restores the disintegrated cosmic puru„a.12 The early Vedic myths describe the head of the sacrifice being obtained through a competition between the devas and the asuras that echoes real battles on Earth. In the sâtras of the Black Yajur Veda, Heesterman sees evi-dence of the preclassical culture wherein real battles took place for cattle and land (Heesterman 1967, 35ff). The head referred to in the sacrifice is here the head of an enemy conquered in battle. After the enemy’s head is cut off, according to the ritual described in the Black Yajur Veda, the head is replaced with an anthill containing seven holes. The anthill is thus linked to the sacrificial beheading of a buffalo in rituals to village goddesses, and to the beheading of ReæukÅ.
In the PeriyapŬaiyam myth, a liÙga appears when the zamindar breaks the anthill open with an ax. The liÙga as the axis mundi, the center of the universe that connects the three worlds, is shown vividly in this version of a very well-known myth from TiruvaææÅmalai (south-west of KÅñcipuram) in which the liÙga appears as a pillar of fire:
BrahmÅ and Vi„æu quarreled over who was superior. ÷iva appeared to them in a liÙga of fire. Vi„æu tried to find its base by digging in the form of a boar, while BrahmÅ became a goose and flew toward the top. Neither could find any limit to the liÙga. They recognized it as a form of ÷iva, who made the fiery liÙga into the mountain TiruvaææÅmalai. (Shulman 1980, 42)
The liÙga links the shrine to heaven as well as to the nether world, the abode of serpents, the realm of chaos and death out of which new life and order are created. The liÙga rising out of the anthill is also related to the traditional inhabitant of the anthill, the serpent, who has an extensive mythology. For instance, the goddess MÅtan¯ki, who is considered the deified washerwoman in the ReæukÅ myth, is said to have revealed herself when a king struck an anthill with his spear, piercing the head of the goddess. MÅtan¯ki emerged from the anthill holding the heavens in her left hand and the cosmic serpent Ädi±e„a in her right hand (Elmore 1915, 94–95). Snakes are identified with the great cosmic serpent and are treated as divinities.13 The ser-pent is also associated with sacrifice and rebirth, for which it is a natural symbol, as it emerges in a new skin from its own old skin. The earth is itself fixed on the cosmic Ädi±e„a, eternally reborn out of the act of aging (Shulman 1980, 120). Ädi±e„a marks boundaries. He en-circles the universe of time: when Vi„æu lies down on him, it is the
end of an age, or kalpa, and the beginning of a night of BrahmÅ; when Vi„æu wakes up, it is the beginning of a new kalpa, or day of BrahmÅ.
He also encircles the universe of space, moving around the zodiac in the course of a year (Hiltebeitel 1991, 310).
The PeriyapŬaiyam temple embodies the sacrificial themes in the myths. About one hundred meters away from the main temple is a small structure housing a giant anthill, with a large picture of BavÅËiyammaË behind it and a stone head in front; there is a sacred neem tree here as well, and several smaller anthills scattered around.
Devotees offer raw eggs and milk to the snakes who live inside the anthill. Serpent-stones, nÅkakkal, are set up around the tree in the temple compound, where people come to pray for fertility. The tree, along with the liÙga, represents the axis mundi, with roots in the netherworld and branches that reach up towards heaven. This anthill temple is attended by its own scheduled caste priest.14 Outside of the temple grounds but in the village of PeriyapŬaiyam is a middle-aged woman named GaÙgamma who is a devotee of the goddess GaÙgamma, con-sidered locally to be one of the Seven Sisters along with BavÅËiyammaË.
GaÙgamma has a large anthill growing on one of the inside walls of her house which she worships. When I saw it, the anthill was anointed with kumkum, turmeric, and had a decorated pot, a symbol of the goddess, on top of it. Through the power of the goddess, GaÙgamma has been a healer in the village for twenty years.
In the main temple, the central image is only BavÅËiyammaË’s head (next to a small liÙga). In a small shrine next to the main temple is the washerwoman who was killed along with ReæukÅ, called MÅtan¯kiyammaË. Five traditional priests from the Naidu caste per-form functions in the temple, as well as two brahmin priests who were appointed to serve largely in the shrines for VinÅyakar (Gane±a) and VeÙka‡acalapati (the god at Tirupati), at the front of the main temple.
So BavÅËiyammaË’s body seems to have disappeared, possibly ab-sorbed by the earth from which she emerged, leaving only her head exposed (see Masilamani-Meyer 1989, 90–91; Sax 1991, 18ff; Doniger 1995, 19). Para±urÅma, her son, is her first devotee: he stands vigi-lantly in front of her image in the temple, in perpetual worship of the goddess he has helped to create. By murdering his mother and giving her the body of an Untouchable, he has taken her away from her husband, who as a Brahmin refuses to take back a wife with such a defiled body. Interestingly, although devotees in PeriyapŬaiyam in-sist that BavÅËiyammaË is married to ÷iva, he plays virtually no role in her worship in this village. The striking contrast between the focus on ReæukÅ’s wifely conduct in her marriage to Jamadagni and her subsequent transformation into an independent, though motherly,
163 Reconstructing the Split Goddess as ÷akti
goddess is partly illuminated, I think, by BavÅËiyammaË’s annual festival.